Against Evolutionary Ethics

Numerous ethical theories have been proposed as a foundation of business ethics, and this often brings about appreciable perplexity. This article seeks to identify specific problems for a sound foundation of this discipline. A first problem is this multiplicity of ethical theories, each with its own metaethics, often accepted without a serious discussion of their philosophical grounds. A second problem is the fragmentation of theories; some centred on duties or obligations, others on consequences, virtues, or moral sentiments. In addition, some theories focus on universal principles, while others take the singularity of each situation as their focal point. A third problem is that not every ethical theory covers the personal, organizational and societal dimensions of business ethics, and this introduces reductionism. These problems cannot be satisfactorily addressed through ‘ethical pluralism’, in which all theories are accepted, without falling into ethical relativism. ‘Ethical pragmatism’, which welcomes any ethical theory only on the basis of their practically, is also questioned. Furthermore, there is the problem of integrating ethics into business theory, which is often extrinsic to the economic function. After analysing these problems, the article concludes by exploring some proposals that might serve to build a sound and complete ethical theory which includes human goods (objective values), principles (or norms) and virtues. The necessity of reconsidering the human action for a closer integration of ethics into business theory is also suggested.

Introduction Philosophy instructors have long noted that students often find ethics courses unrelated to their lives--abstract, dry, and dull. I believe that using literature in conjunction with ethical theory is not only an effective way to teach moral philosophy but it also makes ethics classes more interesting and more relevant to students' lives and concerns. The purpose of this article is twofold: to argue in favor of using literature in ethics classes and to show that this is carried out most efficiently by using a couple of novels--preferably two that have different takes on the same issues--rather than short selections as advocated by some authors. To illustrate my case, I will describe an ethics course in which I use Mouloud Mammeri's L'Opium et le baton, (1) Albert Camus' The Plague, and Oliver Johnson's Ethics: Selections from Classical and Contemporary Writers as the primary texts. (2) I. Advantages and Limitations of the Standard Methods of Teaching Ethics College instructors usually adopt either a theoretical or an applied approach to teaching ethics. The former approach takes the form of either a presentation of the philosophies of Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill--virtue ethics, deontology, and utilitarianism--followed by the standard objections to them, or the examination of important themes of ethics such as autonomy, rights, justice, etc. In theory classes, real-life problems are sometimes discussed in the light of theories, but lectures and discussions are usually directed towards the evaluation of arguments and the analysis of ethical concepts, principles, and theories. Applied ethics courses, on the other hand, are case-based. Books in applied ethics usually start with a chapter in which normative theories are explained. In the subsequent chapters, the theories are applied to analyze real and hypothetical moral problems in medicine, business, the environment, etc. In these courses, the focus is on application rather than on theories for their own sake. When students are asked to examine cases, they are expected to (1) describe the pertinent facts of the case, (2) clarify the moral problem involved, (3) identify the stakeholders, (4) present alternative solutions, (5) articulate and critically evaluate reasons for each one of them, and (6) recommend the solution in favor of which one has the strongest arguments. Each approach to teaching ethics outlined above obviously has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of the theory approach is the grounding in philosophy, historical depth, and exercise in conceptual analysis and argumentation that result. The case approach to teaching ethics has the advantage of making ethics concrete. It also allows students to imagine tackling moral problems they may encounter in their professional lives and may be useful to teach students how to deal with some relatively noncontroversial and simple issues, such as informed consent and confidentiality. The major disadvantages of the traditional ways of teaching ethics are their abstraction and their oversimplification of the moral life, and this is precisely what makes them dull and uninteresting: students tend to dismiss course material in which the people do not think, feel, and behave the way they expect ordinary people to think, feel, and behave and tend to get more involved in courses in which they do. Indeed, for modern moral theorists, moral values can be compared on a common scale, duty for deontologists and utility for utilitarians. But, as Bernard Williams pointed out, lived morality contains, in addition to duty and utility, all sorts of values that cannot be compared on a common scale: gratitude, friendship, commitments, the sense of personal responsibility, and the aspiration to become a certain kind of person (Williams, 1981, p. 76). In addition, according to deontologists and utilitarians alike, morality is essentially a question of knowledge: Emotions are irrelevant and possibly dangerous; they, therefore, ought to be set aside because they undermine the possibility of shared morality and destroy its rational character. …

Comments on the original article, "Nonrational processes in ethical decision making" by M. D. Rogerson et al (see record 2011-19198-001). The current authors suggest that Rogerson, Gottlieb, Handelsman, Knapp, and Younggren (October 2011) presumed that the only ethical theories available for grounding decision-making models are of the rational, neoliberal variety. Rogerson et al stated, "Contextual, interpersonal, and intuitive factors are inextricably linked and inexorably influential in the process of ethical decision making. Ethical theory would benefit from encompassing these subtle yet powerful forces" (Rogerson et al., 2011, p. 616). They sought to augment these models with a cluster of contextual considerations, appending to them accounts of emotion, context, and intuition. First, notwithstanding the theories attributed to (the caricature of) Kant and his ilk, there are several ethical theories that include an account of what Rogerson et al. (2011) consider to be "nonrational" processes. From feminist theories to narrative ethics, sophisticated contextual theories have been developed and are readily available. Second, we question whether thick contextual considerations can simply be tacked on to extant models of decision making originally built upon a philosophical foundation that assumes a rational, autonomous agent who deliberates independently and logically.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Suggestions for a New Integration in the Psychology of Morality

THE PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST OF THE HEBREW-CHRISTIAN MORAL TRADITION I. INTRODUCTION I BORROW this essay's title from the book I intend to discuss, Alan Donagan's The Theory of Morality, where it serves as the heading of an important section.1 It is striking to find a philosopher of Donagan's stature devoting an entire book to the reconstruction and defense of the moral content of a religious tradition. A survey of ethical theory would show that the question of why one might want to subject such a tradition to detailed ethical scrutiny has rarely been posed in this century, let alone answered in terms that would be convincing to a secular audience. Theologians, when addressing the faithful, usually either assume the answer will be obvious or give an answer only the faithful could take seriously as a source of motivation. The same theologians, when addressing a general audience on a specific moral problem, typically search £or common assumptions in a way that blurs whatever distinctive contribution their religious tradition might make. Secular students of religious ethics tend either to attempt value-free description or to argue on philosophical grounds that the relationship between religion and morality is basically invariant and can he discovered a priori. They thus either studiously avoid giving readers reasons for being interested in their subject or make historical investigation of actual religious traditions seem relatively insignificant.2 1 Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Phoenix edition, 1979), p. !'l6. In the remainder of this article page references to Donagan's book will be given in parentheses in the text. 2 These tendencies in religious ethics are discussed in my book, The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), chap. IO. 165 166 JEFFREY STOUT Theologians and those secular academicians who specialize in the field called religious ethics have, of course, studied the ethical aspects of the religious traditions; they have, however, said rather little to show why such study might be justified on grounds that are neither theological nor antiquarian. Philosophers , on the other hand, have, throughout most of this century, felt free to dismiss religious ethics as plainly fallacious and therefore not worthy of extensive historical study from a philosophical point of view. It was possible for many years to defend this dismissal merely by citing famous arguments from Plato, Hume, Kant, and G. E. Moore. These arguments demonstrated, so most philosophers thought, that religion must depend logically upon morality, as opposed to the other way around, and that attempts to derive moral judgments and concepts from theological judgments and concepts could not possibly succeed. Not everyone accepted all the arguments: occasional doubts were raised especially about the ones drawn from Hume and Moore, which seemed to threaten not only religious ethics but much else besides. Yet almost everyone accepted at least one of the arguments, and accorded religious ethical traditions a kind of neglect one could hardly term benign . Meanwhile, logical positivism and related doctrines gave independent reasons for deeming religious propositions meaningless or, at 'best, false. On many counts, then, religious ethics seemed an unlikely contender for philosophical attention. Virtually all those who did attend to it did so with polemical intent reminiscent of the Enlightenment's struggle with superstition . Most theologians either ignored the polemics entirely or were too busy retreating to put up a fight. Recently, however, much has changed in philosophy. The same developments in philosophy of language and epistemology that have undermined positivistic critiques of religion, and have thus helped revive philosophical theology as an acceptable vocation for professional philosophers, have also undermined confidence in the standard dismissals of religious ethics.q The 8 For an account of these developments and their impact upon philosophy of religion and ethics, see ibid., parts II and III. THE HEBREW-CHRISTIAN MORAL TRADITION 167 result has by no means been mass conversion of the moral philosophers. Nonetheless, the ethical interest of what Donagan calls the Hebrew..:Christian moral tradition does seem to have re-emerged as a philosophically respectable topic over the past two decades or so. One set of reasons for ascribing philosophical...

Justice, Reason, and Luck in Rationing Lifesaving Medical Resources

Benefit/cost analysis is a technique for evaluating programs, procedures, and actions; it is not a moral theory. There is significant controversy over the moral justification of benefit/cost analysis. When a procedure for evaluating social policy is challenged on moral grounds, defenders frequently seek a justification by construing the procedure as the practical embodiment of a correct moral theory. This has the apparent advantage of avoiding difficult empirical questions concerning such matters as the consequences of using the procedure. So, for example, defenders of benefit/cost analysis (BCA) are frequently tempted to argue that this procedurejust isthe calculation of moral Tightness – perhaps that what itmeansfor an action to be morally right is just for it to have the best benefit-to-cost ratio given the accounts of “benefit” and “cost” that BCA employs. They suggest, in defense of BCA, that they have found the moral calculus – Bentham's “unabashed arithmetic of morals.” To defend BCA in this manner is to commit oneself to one member of a family of moral theories (let us call thembenefit/cost moral theoriesorB/C moral theories) and, also, to the view that if a procedure is (so to speak) the direct implementation of a correct moral theory, then it is a justified procedure. Neither of these commitments is desirable, and so the temptation to justify BCA by direct appeal to a B/C moral theory should be resisted; it constitutes an unwarranted short cut to moral foundations – in this case, an unsound foundation. Critics of BCA are quick to point out the flaws of B/C moral theories, and to conclude that these undermine the justification of BCA. But the failure to justify BCA by a direct appeal to B/C moral theory does not show that the technique is unjustified. There is hope for BCA, even if it does not lie with B/C moral theory.

BOOK REVIEWS 313 viewing his own rational dogmatism as an adequate answer to the quidjuris, he interpreted it as the expression of a demand, as (in Engsder's words) "the formulation of the assertoric-hypothetical imperative of our cognition." One hopes that Engsfler's brief but suggestive discussion of this late phase of Maimon's philosophy will stimulate others to explore this topic more fully. What were Maimon's real philosophical intentions? Did he wish to "complete" the Kantian philosophy? Did he mean to construct an original system of his own? Or was he a fundamentally eclectic thinker, intent upon constructing (in his own phrase) a "Coalitionsystem" which would reconcile the theories of Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant? "None of the above" is Engstler's answer. Instead, he suggests that the key to understanding Maimon is to appreciate that his philosophical interests were always focused Upon specificproblems. In stark contrast to most of his contemporaries he was not a "systematic thinker" at all, but was a Problemd, enker--a "fox," if you will, not a "hedgehog." Engsfler himself attaches extraordinary importance to this feature of Maimon's Den/tart (which he rather boldly attributes to his "Talmudic education") and concludes by calling explicit attention to the fundamental difference between Maimon's aporetic way of thinking and the systematic method characteristic of Fichte, a difference which he finds to be much more important than any similarities between their specific views. In the.end, Engstler seems haunted by a vision of the "road not taken" in German philosophy, described by Dilthey as follows: "If the method of analysis developed by Lambert, Kant, and Maimon had been pursued .... then the path taken by our philosophy would have been entirely different." How successful is Engsfler's "revised" interpretation of Maimon? It is a complete success. No reader of this monograph is ever likely to view Maimon as an acute critic who tried to "improve" Kant's philosophy by eliminating the "thing in itself" and succeeded merely in opening the path toward the Wissenschaftslehre. Beyond this, Engsfler's admirable study makes a significant contribution toward obtaining an accurate understanding of Maimon's own, highly original philosophical standpoint and will, perhaps, lead new readers to discover the works of this fascinating thinker. In an age which clearly prefers foxes to hedgehogs, Maimon may at last have found his public. DANIEL BREAZEALE UniversityofKentt~ky Allen W. Wood. Hegel'sEthical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199o. Pp. xxi + 293. Cloth, $49.5o. This book is at once a detailed account of Hegel's social and political thought (Parts 2 to 4 being devoted respectively to Abstract Right, Morality, and Ethical Life) and an account (in Part 1) of the "philosophical foundations" thereof. Such foundations are not to be looked for in Hegel's speculative metaphysics, whose dismissal is so 314 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:2 APRIL X992 brief as to be little more than a dogmatic assurance that Hegel's speculative logic is dead, but rather in his ethical theory, what we might call his metaethics. In other words, the foundations of Hegel's political theory are a rational ethics, not a rational theodicy (8). This ethical theory turns out to be a "rather Aristotelian variety of ethical naturalism " (19), a theory better conceived as a self-actualization theory than either a deontological or a teleological theory. Its affinity with the classical naturalisms of Plato and Aristotle is found in its willingness, unlike contemporary empirically oriented naturalisms, to be "unashamedly part of a philosophical tradition of grand theorizing about human nature and history" (33). But it differs from its classical predecessors in two ways. First, it is a dialectical or historicized naturalism that does not take human nature to be timelessly given. It is thus a theory about practical reason under the conditions of modernity. Second, it views the highest human good as freedom rather than happiness . Chapter 9 is devoted to explicating Hegel's understanding of freedom and Chapter 3 to his reasons for giving it priority over happiness. Because of the care with which they attend 1) to the relevant texts from Hegel's corpus, e) to the immediate philosophical context, primarily Kant...

The essential difficulty about Computer Ethics‘ (CE) philosophical status is a methodological problem: standard ethical theories cannot easily be adapted to deal with CE-problems, which appear to strain their conceptual resources, and CE requires a conceptual foundation as an ethical theory. Information Ethics (IE), the philosophical foundational counterpart of CE, can be seen as a particular case of ’’environmental‘‘ ethics or ethics of the infosphere. What is good for an information entity and the infosphere in general? This is the ethical question asked by IE. The answer is provided by a minimalist theory of deseerts: IE argues that there is something more elementary and fundamental than life and pain, namely being, understood as information, and entropy, and that any information entity is to be recognised as the centre of a minimal moral claim, which deserves recognition and should help to regulate the implementation of any information process involving it. IE can provide a valuable perspective from which to approach, with insight and adequate discernment, not only moral problems in CE, but also the whole range of conceptual and moral phenomena that form the ethical discourse.

Persian philosophy, which exists in the middle ground between Eastern and Western philosophy, corresponds to philosophy as an archetype (root), and East-West philosophy is organically connected by that root. In Persian philosophy, Erfan (Mysticism) constitutes the most important field of philosophy. This is also related to the fact that Persia is called the home of mysticism (Sufism). In fact, the terms of Erfan and Sufism are sometimes used without distinction in domestic and foreign philosophy & literature. The foundation of philosophy in ancient Persia comes from Zoroaster (Zarathustra)’s philosophical thought. Some of his thought is related to Zoroastrian mysticism. His thought was divided into two axes: the theory of soul, and the theory of morality. The Sorush Yasht in the Avesta is the highest peak of mysticism in Persia. Sorush Yasht is a return to ‘Gatha mysticism’, and it is known that Gatha was written by Zoroaster. Here, the meaning of writing includes rewriting or correction. This study of the transmission of Eastern and Western philosophy, from ancient Greece to ancient China, focuses on the dual figures of Plato and Lao-tzu. They were the forerunners of mysticism in ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, both greatly influenced by Zoroaster’s philosophical thought. For instance, in ancient Greece Plato was regarded as the resurrection and rebirth of Zoroaster. Persian philosophy as an archetype of philosophy is not well known in East-West philosophy, and there is a need to re-establish this connection as a new research area in the twenty-first century.

In his book For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics (2022), Alex John London argues that the current framework for human research ethics and oversight is an assortment of rules, procedures, and guidelines built upon mistaken assumptions, policies, and practices that create spurious dilemmas and serious moral failings. He claims that his theory can fix these problems by placing human participant research on a solid philosophical foundation. London argues that human participant research is a social activity guided by principles of justice, in which free and equal individuals work together to promote the common good. This review essay analyzes London's approach to the foundations of human research ethics. Although London's theory of human research ethics is excessively idealistic, his book succeeds in showing why it is necessary to expand the scope of human research ethics beyond its current confines to adequately deal with questions of intranational and international justice.

Morality is important for how humans treat each other and non-human animals. Differences in moral thinking have been found between autistic and neurotypical individuals. This research has relied on ways of thinking about moral psychology that suggest that mature morals develop as individuals learn to take the perspectives of others. Yet, even autistic individuals, who sometimes differ in their ability to take others' perspectives, make moral judgements that are similar to neurotypical individuals. Moral foundations theory suggests that moral psychology is not hierarchical but differs depending on culture. This theory could therefore help make sense of similarities and differences in autistic and neurotypical moral thinking. Moral foundations theory has not yet been investigated among autistic individuals. In this study, we interviewed autistic adults as a first attempt at understanding how moral foundations theory fits with autistic moral thinking. We found that all five moral foundations of moral foundations theory were represented in the interviews, yet certain foundations appeared more prominent than others. The autistic adults interviewed in our study discussed issues of care and fairness more than of loyalty, authority or purity when prompted to discuss moral transgressions. Future research should use quantitative methods to compare groups of autistic and neurotypical individuals to clarify similarities and differences in moral thinking between the groups.

This article explores the role of interplayer moral conversation in multiplayer games with three subquestions: how to design and use games for morality research, how advances in moral theory can inform game-based research into morals, and how game-based research can inform moral theory. A long tradition has investigated morals using games such as Ultimatum and Dictator; however, this research often omits interplayer moral dialogue. Further, when moral foundations theory is accounted for, analysis of these games seems to investigate a narrow range of moral reasoning. In this methodological critique, we draw upon data from gameplay of a simulation of climate change debate and find a wide range of moral foundations through analysis of dialogue. Our analysis suggests that in-game player dialogue is a source of rich moral deliberation and potential for using simulation games as grounds for discovering new moral foundations.

Clinical bioethics and core competencies of attributes, attitudes, and behaviors: Foundations in philosophy and literature

The Domain of Reasons